Tag Archives: Italy

When the Euro was launched in 1999, I was but a wee lad, barely over one year into an undergraduate degree in the dismal science. The common currency was something of a curiosity at the time as its ambition was unprecedented even for our globalized age. After all, it certainly seemed to be one giant step ahead of my country’s own feeble attempt (in comparison) at economic union: NAFTA, which had barely half a decade of existence at the time. For those who were worried about US hegemony, the launch of the Euro was a subtle reminder that a new and powerful economic force was being born, one which would hopefully shape the global economy into the more socially progressive image of Europe, rather than the rapacious gung-ho capitalism which Washington and Wall Street had shoved down our throats. More symbolically, it represented – at least in my eyes – a watershed event in history, whereby for the first time Europe was united not by Napoleon’s guns, or Hitler’s panzers, but by a common and voluntary belief that the path to future prosperity was one that no European country should have to travel alone.

It’s time to question its existence

How the times have changed. I’m not going to dwell on the implications or even the possibility of a Euro breakdown (there’s plenty of that around), but it has come to a point where a economists we should really question whether the Euro was that great leap forward promised a decade ago by Europe’s leaders, or a colossal mistake whose benefits were overhyped and its potential drawbacks blissfully (or conveniently) ignored. For this I found a nice little PDF from the European Commission, probably written around 2007, right before the financial crisis exploded in everyone’s faces. With the benefits of hindsight let’s see whether the Euro has lived up to its lofty promises. Continue reading →

In my previous post, I tried to explain why a Greek collapse (be this in the form of a default or a Euro exit) should not be such a catastrophe to anyone except for the Greeks themselves. The cost of recapitalizing exposed banks would be a fraction of the money spent rescuing the banking system in 2008, and the financial and trade linkages with Greece and the rest of the Eurozone are so meagre that the common currency area should be strong enough to resist one of its weakest members going bust. But of course, that is not the scenario that keeps European politicians awake at night these days. That is Because although a Greek default may appear to be a disaster, a default among one of the Eurozone’s bigger economies – mainly Spain and France – would be economic Armageddon. A scenario like this would dwarf even Lehman’s bankruptcy in the scale of devastation it would unleash upon the global economy, particularly now that governments in the West are too weak to undertake bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus packages like they did back in 2008-09.

But this leads me to the second part of my argument: even the doomsday scenario of an Italian collapse doesn’t hold up to the reality of its economic fundamentals. I’m not saying this means it could never happen. Quite the contrary: if markets believe it will happen, it will happen, all that is needed is to get enough market aversion to Italian debt that Italy’s bond yields are pushed to unsustainable levels. But why should markets believe it? And more importantly, why didn’t markets believe this during the first year of the Euro crisis, when Italian bond yields had been left practically untouched? What has changed during this time?